Out of the blue, TOM KING received a weighty hand-bound volume of history in the mail. He visited the publisher and author Frank Prior to hear the tale behind the tome.

Last month an extraordinary volume thumped resoundingly onto the floor by my desk.

Millennium Hockley, written, printed and bound by Frank Prior, is a weighty tome in more than just the scholarly sense. Drop it onto your toe and you will be impressed - and so will the toe. Millennium Hockley tips the scales at just under 2lb.

Frank, 78, is a retired railwayman of the Great Eastern Railway, as were his father and grandfather before him. He lives in Hockley, as they did.

Some 35 years ago, Frank went to the local Hockley library to ask for a book about the history of his home town. "Sorry, there isn't one," they told him.

In fact, the last time that anybody wrote a book about Hockley was in 1842. A lot had happened since then. In 1842 there wasn't a population to speak of. Even the Priors of Hockley lived somewhere else.

So, in the absence of a history of his ancestral habitation, Frank sat down to write one.

"Sat down" is only a turn of phrase, since the legwork involved in this project was enormous. Frank's job as a railwayman allowed him to scour second-hand bookshops all over the country, as far afield as York.

Information about Hockley lay scattered around all over the place. Everywhere, really, except for Hockley itself.

"I'd come home with sackfuls of books," he recalls. One room in his home has been turned into a library, stacked floor to ceiling with ancient volumes and stacks of papers.

The project has demanded other faculties as well as strong legs and shoulders. The first requirement was persistence. "To start off, I needed a copy of the 1841 census," Frank says, "so I wrote to the Record Office. 'Ooo, dear, no, we can't do that', they said".

However, the deceptively gentle Frank Prior, ex far-eastern POW, knows about sustained campaigns. "In the end they made an exception for me," he says dryly.

Starting with this raw material, Frank gradually traced the personal stories of scores of historic Hockleyites, as they came and departed the village. Some vanished, but many set up dynasties which, in some cases, persist to this day.

Having finally collected the material, Frank then printed and bound it himself.

Every morning, at 5am, he rose from bed and laboured by his home-made book-press (Frank acquired some knowledge of the process from his father-in-law, a professional bookbinder).

Three and a half decades after Frank paid that initial visit to the library, he dropped a copy in. The response was appropriately gracious.

"We've got a Hockley reference library at last," they told him.

The story of the book Millennium Hockley and the story of the tale of Frank's own life are pretty closely intertwined, and both are now overshadowed by an extraordinary irony.

In the very month that Frank's book finally appeared, another exhaustive history of Hockley hit the book-stands - Leslie Vingoe's Hockley, Hullbridge and Hawkwell Past. Hockley had gone without a book for 157 years. Now, like buses, two came along at the same time.

It might appear that life had kicked an old scholar in the teeth. But Frank's response is surprisingly phlegmatic. "I've been a Far East prisoner of war," he says. "You learn to take life as it comes."

Frank has always been a man with a mission. "People say that Hockley is a dull, sleepy old place, but it isn't," he says.

In any case, local history is in his blood. The task has a lot in common with detective work. Frank loves teasing out the clues and leads. His account of putting together his book is peppered with little phrases like: "So I thinks and I thinks," or: "Hallo, what's this? I'll have a little read of this."

Frank's fingers dart over the piles of ageing documents like a bank-teller, pulling out a page here, a reference there.

In between his researches on Hockley, he has also become something of an expert on the much wider field of the sea and seafarers.

One of Frank's ancestor sailed with Nelson, as he'll tell you with some pride, but Frank isn't a sailor himself. His voyaging has been through oceans of paper and parchment.

In the process, he has managed to unearth new details about Nelson, and his booklet about Brunel's ship the Great Britain has been placed on the Bristol University internet site.

Personally, Frank views his passion almost as an illness. "Genealogy is a bug, a disease," he says. "Once it's inside of you, you can never get it out."

Frank talks sketchily about his more recent life as deputy-controller at Liverpool Street, and, before that, as Japanese prisoner-of-war.

Before that, though, he retains astonishing, almost total, recall, right down to the exact number of signal-box windows (169) he had to clean in his early days as a young lad on the railway.

His days now are largely housebound, tending to his wife and binding his books, but he doesn't feel restricted. His mind has the whole historic past through which to roam. It is, perhaps, a sort of reward for all those years of research.

Frank's passion for the past, however, is far from clinical. When he talks about some of the sadder stories, particularly about the lost men of World War One, his voice cracks and he has to stop talking for a moment.

From all the countless thousands of sentences set down by Frank, one stands out in particular. "Hockley," he says, "has always been full of people who, while apparently very ordinary on the surface, are rich characters when you really find out about them."

With Millennium Hockley at last occupying a large chunk of the local library shelves, we can now add Frank Prior himself to that list of characters.

Work of love - Frank displays a copy of the hand-produced book on the history of Hockley

Picture: STEVE O'CONNELL

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.